


Never Fall

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-03-06
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mozzie always knew he'd die alone. Written for Run-The-Con's rounds of 24-hour schmoopfic, for the prompt "on the waterfront". (I *swear* there's schmoop hiding in here somewhere, and no character deaths at all.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Some spoilers for 2x10.

Mozzie always knew he'd die alone.

This isn't gloom or depression, it's simple logic. Everyone is alone, when it comes down to it. People like to cherish their comforting illusions about family and love and loyalty. They can't see the shifting sands underlying the seeming solidity of these things, the feet of clay at the statue's base. Mozzie has never been able _not_ to see the impermanence, the instability. 

Although he didn't realize it until years later, he found a perfect metaphor when he read his first book on quantum physics as a kid. The whole world and everything in it, every tree and dog and car and badly repaired Detroit sidewalk, was made up of mostly empty space. Everything looked so solid, and people walked around acting like it was solid, but it was 99.9% empty space. (It had taken a couple of days for Mr. Jeffries to convince Mozzie that he wasn't going to accidentally fall into a hole in the universe. He had been only eight, after all. In all honesty Mozzie _still_ isn't entirely convinced of it, but has learned better than to mention this to people.)

But from that day forward, he had his metaphor for human relationships, even if he didn't apply it until later. Solid on the surface, mostly empty space underneath, and everyone falls through the cracks eventually. _Everyone._ The times when people are most afraid and hurt and vulnerable -- the times when they want most desperately to believe that their family and loved ones would close ranks around them and protect them from the world -- are precisely those times when the cracks open wide and wider, when the circle of loved ones grows ragged and thin, and people find excuses to be elsewhere.

( _Friendship is a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul._ So said Ambrose Bierce: cynic, iconoclast, bitter genius. That old warhorse chose his own way out, vanishing in the Mexican wilderness at the age of 71, never to be seen again. Mozzie respects that.)

Who knows this vulnerability better than a con man, after all? Exploiting those cracks, and the suburban masses' deep-down insecurity about them, is what people like them _do._ Neal has never liked to think about it. Neal cherishes his own illusions about the things they do, the kind of people they are, and because it's Neal, Mozzie has never wanted to lay his fantasies bare. The world does enough of that, after all.

( _We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone,_ Orson Welles once said. _Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone._ But the shell game only works until you realize it's a shell game. What's behind the curtain? Nothing. Love is a placebo that loses its effectiveness once it's exposed for the falsehood it is.)

Sometimes, being exposed to Neal's core of bone-deep optimism as frequently as he is, Mozzie almost thinks he can believe in the things Neal believes in. There are times when he wants to shake Neal until his teeth rattle, because Neal is just going to keep putting himself out there and getting hurt, over and over and over again, and Mozzie doesn't want to keep watching it. But there are also times when Neal's belief in people is like a furnace where Mozzie can warm himself, kindling an ember in him that he'd thought died long ago.

Still, he's known from childhood that someday he'll make a fatal mistake (a con gone bad, an enemy coming up in his blind spot, a federal agent behind an unexamined bush) and he'll die alone, hurting and scared and cold. That's just a fact. He might hope for a warm, sunny retirement on an island somewhere, but in reality, he knows full well that there are no happy endings for guys like them. You keep running until you slip and fall and the hounds catch you. There is no safety net; the police and the hospitals and the rest of the infrastructure that the marks depend on isn't there for people like Mozzie and Neal (and very often isn't even there for people who've spent their whole lives trusting in it and paying into the system, but just try convincing someone who's been drinking the government-issue Kool-Aid all their life). Old thieves don't die in bed, surrounded by loving children and grandchildren. They die like Hale did: a bullet to the back of the head in a lonely spot. They die in prison, and they die in flophouses when the money runs out, and sometimes they go down in a hail of law-enforcement bullets and become a story that people will talk about for generations. (Would Bonnie and Clyde be a legend, would Butch and Sundance, if they'd died at age ninety in a nursing home with crowds of family around the bed? Mozzie doesn't think so.) 

They die of a bullet wound under a Long Island pier on a November day when the wind off the ocean cuts like a knife.

It doesn't make it any easier, of course, in the end. Because he doesn't _want_ to die. He's always fought to live harder than just about anyone he knows. He's clever and slippery; he knows when to make a stand and when to run away. He's fenced himself with technology and with money and with safehouses and fake identities. And all of that is because he knows that in the end, the only person he can count on is himself. He can't even rely on Neal -- as much as it warms him on those occasions when Neal's loyalty blindsides him, Mozzie knows that Neal has his own life to live, one which may not always coincide with Mozzie's. And besides, Neal can't come through if he's in prison, or dead, which (much as Mozzie hates to even think of it) are possibilities for him too.

( _I may climb perhaps to no great heights, but I will climb alone._ Cyrano de Bergerac, who died at age 36; he climbed a long way, but only for a short time.)

The rocks are slick, the ocean wind fierce, and all things end.

_If you want a happy ending, that depends on where you stop your story._ He'd quoted that to Neal once. And somehow, in that case, it wasn't the ending that either one of them had expected, but a better one than they'd hoped for.

It would have been a good place to stop.

But, when it comes right down to it, the story of life only ends one way. _Life is a journey, not a destination,_ said Emerson: because there is only one destination, and it basically sucks, so the point is to enjoy the journey.

Everybody dies. People talk about good deaths and bad deaths, but in the end there are really just deaths. Granted, he doesn't want to suffer too much first. That would be good to avoid. (He's not doing a very good job at the moment. This _hurts._ And he's smart, he should be able to think of a way out of this, but he can't, because he's tired and he's been running a long time and sometimes you just hit the end of your rope.)

There's a rustling above him and he knows they've found him, and he really should care, but there's a part of him that's just glad it's over.

A dark figure drops down next to him in a swirl of long gray overcoat, and Mozzie closes his eyes (it's done, over, and he doesn't have anyone else's words to help him through this; you die alone, even deserted by the master authors). And then a voice, a _familiar_ voice, says, "Mozzie?" in worried tones.

"Suit?" he whispers and opens his eyes. Peter is bending over him, face tense and weary and worried in a way that somehow cleaves Mozzie open to the bone. 

"Diana, I got him -- need an ambulance, _yesterday,_ " Peter snaps into his radio, and now Mozzie is being manhandled. (Fedhandled?) He doesn't have the strength to complain as he's hauled farther from the breaking waves, away from the cold ocean spray that he now realizes is drenching him.

"You led us on a merry chase," Peter says, stripping off his coat to bundle Mozzie in it. In his regular, cheap Brooks Brothers suit, he looks hopelessly out of place on the wave-slick rocks. "When you don't want to be found, you really, _really_ can't be found. Neal is going out of his mind, by the way."

And yet somehow the Suit has managed to find him, against all odds and even in time, sort of. Now Mozzie has an idea of what Neal's been having to deal with, all these years. "Neal -- all right?" His voice is a thread of sound in his own ears.

"Neal? There's nothing wrong with Neal. Neal's fine. _You're_ the one who got shot." Peter sounds ever so slightly accusing. There's blood on his hands and Mozzie has a bad feeling it might be his own.

Getting shot twice in one lifetime is really unfair, and Mozzie says so, even though he stopped believing in _fair_ and _unfair_ on the schoolyard, and okay, maybe he says that too, because he really is kind of far gone.

"Mozzie," Peter says sternly, and Mozzie pulls himself together, blinking owlishly at Peter's face. "Yeah, that's more like it. Stay with me."

"Tell Neal --" And then he isn't really sure what he wants Peter to tell Neal. All he knows is that if he can actually manage to come up with any last words, Peter will deliver them, as faithfully as he can. And that's a strange kind of trust that Mozzie isn't sure he's ever felt (ever allowed himself to feel) for anyone before. Neal's got his back with rock-solid loyalty, but Neal isn't precisely _that_ kind of reliable.

Last words. A witty epigram would be nice, here. Except he's never felt less witty in his life. He can't even find _words_ ; all he can find in him is a sort of desperate worry for Neal, and for Elizabeth and even for Peter, and all he can do is whisper, "Please," and knot his bloody hand in Peter's tie.

"Mozzie, stop," Peter says, sounding half desperate himself. "Hear those sirens?" Mozzie doesn't, but somehow he takes Peter's word for it -- he's definitely caught some sort of Suit-virus from Neal. "That's an ambulance, on its way, so just hang on and you'll get to talk to Neal shortly, okay?"

"Getting shot twice in one lifetime is not fair," Mozzie tells Peter's tie. Possibly he's said this before, but Peter just makes agreeing noises. And Mozzie slips away, sliding into darkness, and he's thinking that he should be falling forever, this should be the end, but Peter's still holding onto him so he can't go all the way down.

 

***

 

He surfaces in fragments, in a depressingly familiar hospital bed. Neal's there most of the times he wakes up, reading or napping beside the bed, once playing cards with Mrs. Suit.

When he finally wakes up enough to be coherent, Neal is chatting quietly at his bedside with June. "Welcome back," Neal says, with that soft, fond look that he gets sometimes. It always makes Mozzie a little twitchy when it's directed at him.

"Am I in the system this time?" he mumbles, fiddling with his hospital ID bracelet until he can read the name on it.

"Of course not," June says, warm and amused, as he picks out the name A. Lupin on the bracelet. 

"We've got your back," Neal says, and his tone is joking but his eyes are still soft and serious.

Because they do, of course.

Then Elizabeth Burke sweeps in, on a cloud of light floral perfume, with a basket over her arm and an awkward-looking Peter in tow. The basket contains mostly baked goods, as well as a bundle of straws, which reminds him that Elizabeth never actually learned what he wanted the straws for the other time. He doesn't have the heart to tell her, and besides, the state of the hospital dishwashing _does_ make him nervous.

"I don't think he's allowed to have solid food yet," Neal says. Mozzie mouths _Traitor_ at him.

"More for the rest of us," Peter remarks, reaching into the basket.

"Hey," Mozzie protests weakly, without any real heat behind it.

Tearing the paper off the muffin, Peter looks up and meets his eyes. "So ..." Peter says, trailing off on a faint question, and "So," Mozzie echoes, and there, _that_ subject never has to be brought up again. But he lets Peter have the muffin, even though it means that the entire rest of his impromptu room party end up reaching for the rest of _his_ muffins too. Elizabeth can always bake more.

Mozzie isn't entirely comfortable with this many people in the room. He's muddle-headed from the painkillers, and every instinct screams that this is a dangerous situation: he can't think properly, can't even get up without help. He's vulnerable, unarmored. He could say _anything_.

But they're mostly busy talking to each other anyway, and when June asks quietly if he'd like her to go -- the implication being that she'd happily take any other unwanted guests with her -- Mozzie surprises himself by answering, just as quietly, "No."

He's too muddled and tired to do much talking, but they seem to be doing a fine job of entertaining themselves anyway. Peter goes and finds a couple more chairs somewhere. Even June seems to have settled in for the long term, bringing out a deck of cards. Their voices wash over him; he isn't even paying much attention to what they're saying. When he closes his eyes, the voices are still there, a connection to the world outside himself. He doesn't feel as threatened as he really ought to. Instead he feels ... safe.

Everyone dies alone, but you don't have to live that way.


End file.
